The Pavilion in the Clouds

The Pavilion In The Clouds is a stand-alone novel by popular Scottish author, Alexander McCall Smith. In 1938, when Bella Ferguson is eight, her parents employ a live-in governess, Miss Lavender White. Henry Ferguson owns a tea plantation in Ceylon, and rather than send Bella home to Scotland, he and Virginia decide to arrange tuition on their estate, Pitlochry.

Miss White is an excellent teacher and Bella enjoys her lessons. But it seemed that Virginia is somewhat intimidated by Miss White's intellect, and Bella picks up on this when her mother questions her about her governess.

Bella begins to suspect that Miss White is trying to get rid of her mother so she can marry her daddy, and her dolls, Li Po and Po Chü-i, named after Chinese poets and exhibiting their quite individual personalities, seem to agree, especially after a few strange incidents.

Bella's best friend Richard Macmillan, the ten-year-old son of another plantation owner, suggests a way to get Miss Lavender to go away. This would have the added advantage of Bella being able to go back home to Scotland for school, as Richard will soon do.

About those incidents, and certain things Bella has said, Virginia feels the need to consult her closest friend in the area, Heather Macmillan. Heather has seen it all before, and suggests quick action. Which is what happens. Later Bella is a bit sorry for what she has done, but she never expects to see Miss White again.

McCall Smith is such a skilled story-teller, and here, his main narrators are the slightly precocious Bella with her dolls and her diary and her very active imagination, and the perhaps over-sensitive Virginia. Suspicions are aroused by misinterpreted looks and words, a potentially fatal fall, unrefrigerated water and a cobra.

As always, there's plenty of gentle philosophy on a myriad of topics including colonisation, killing wild animals, the concept of home, intelligence and spinsterhood, a male-dominated society, that men and women think differently, competitiveness. And he includes a delightful twist (or two) in the final resolution.

About bible stories: "we had to believe in something, she told herself, because the truth sometimes seemed too thin to satisfy our yearnings."

"We are uninvited guests, just as we are uninvited guests in every corner of the globe, and yet we take it upon ourselves to dictate how things should be done. That was the massive, almost unbelievable, conceit upon which the whole colonial enterprise was built, and yet nobody seemed to see."

Insightful, sometimes poignant and often humorous, whether his setting is in present day London, Edinburgh, Botswana or pre-war Ceylon, McCall Smith's grasp of people and relationships is superb. Always a delight to read.